Orchestra, singers perform like it's matter of life, death

July 10, 2006|By John von Rhein, Tribune music critic

The subject of death provided James Conlon with a useful musical metaphor for his weekend concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia. You would think this would make his concerts a lugubrious downer, but the effect was quite the opposite: Verdi's Requiem on Saturday took on a life-affirming quality, as you might expect, but so did Friday's performance of Shostakovich's death-haunted Symphony No. 14.

For Verdi, death was a pathway to the blessed beyond of Christian rebirth. For Shostakovich, life ended at the grave. Perhaps we needed to be dragged to the morbid depths to fully appreciate the greatness of Verdi's spiritual drama.

Conlon is conducting Shostakovich's final three symphonies (Nos. 13-15) this season as Ravinia's chief contribution to the Soviet master's centennial. The almost unrelenting bleakness of No. 14 makes it anything but easy summer listening, and one feared that its many subtleties of scoring would be obliterated by passing trains and barking dogs. But the music director drew a devastating performance from his singers and orchestra, in the work's belated Ravinia premiere.

The 14th (1969) isn't really a symphony at all but an orchestral song cycle based on 11 poems about of death by Lorca, Apollinaire, Kuchelbecker and Rilke. The scoring is for soprano and baritone soloists supported by a chamber orchestra (strings, percussion and celesta) that heightens the harrowing poetic images.

The work is an unflinching cry of the soul. In "Suicide," a dead person speaks from the grave about three lilies that grow from his corpse; a solo cello curls dolefully around the singer's voice, like time-lapse photography of growing roots. The only moment of consoling euphony comes in "O Delvig, Delvig," where the baritone's rant about artistic repression is sung over bittersweet, choralelike harmonies for strings.

Both Russian soloists sang their native language with profound expressive involvement. The earthy Slavic soprano of Tatiana Pavlovskaya made the song about Death's entry into a tavern a chilling valse macabre.

Saturnine baritone Sergei Leiferkus was a riveting embodiment of Slavic gloom and doom in everything he sang.

The old debates about whether the Requiem is an opera in ecclesiastical garb or a grandly devotional piece of sacred choral music seemed irrelevant, because Conlon brought out both aspects of Verdi's masterpiece. His pacing and flow had the 15 sections sounding like an architectonic whole. Drawing on his vast experience as a Verdi opera conductor, he embraced the work's wild passions while maintaining firm control. The performance will be long remembered as one of the finest he has ever given at Ravinia. And he elicited superb singing from his high-powered vocal quartet. The great mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe shared not only her plush voice but her inner being. Her sable tones blended beautifully with the firm, shining lyric-spinto soprano of Christine Brewer, who capped off an ethereal "Libera me" ("Grant them eternal rest") with a shimmering pianissimo high B-Flat.

Frank Lopardo's tenor couldn't expand to the climax of the "Ingemisco," but his sound was appealingly Italianate, a trumpet at full volume, an oboe when singing softly. The dark, juicy Slavic bass of Vitalij Kowaljow made a refreshing change from all the dry, woofy basses one has heard in the part.

Director Duain Wolfe has trained his Chicago Symphony Chorus to switch on a dime from the full-throated terror of the "Dies irae," with its furious depiction of the Day of Wrath, to the sweetness and quickness of the "Sanctus." The orchestra, too, sang its heart out. The audience observed a moment of respectful silence before breaking into a storm of approval.